The Stone Mage & the Sea (Books of the Change Book 1)

by Sean Williams

  And there was Shilly, concern written across her face.

  “What happened?” he croaked.

  “You nearly drowned,” she said. Her voice belied both her words and expression: light-hearted, almost joking. “When you hit the water, you went down like a stone. A heavy one. I jumped in after you, but couldn’t see you. You popped up and splashed about for a bit, but by the time I got closer, you were gone again, under a wave. I thought I’d lost you.” She stopped for a second, and glowered across Sal’s prone body. “Lucky for all of us, someone who knew what he was doing jumped in and pulled you out.”

  Sal followed her gaze, saw Kemp through the legs of a bystander, flushing furiously.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The big shit froze,” she hissed in his ear. “I don’t think he was trying to kill you, but he sure as hell didn’t try to rescue you, either. He just stood there gawping while I did my kingfisher impersonation. I can understand him pushing you in for a joke, assuming you could swim, but once he saw that you couldn’t--”

  “He didn’t push me in,” Sal interrupted. “I fell.”

  “Are you sure? I couldn’t see through the scabs.”

  “He startled me, that’s all. I’m pretty sure--”

  “Do you have a home, lad?” The heavy-jowled man was back. Now that Sal was more alert, he noticed the way the man’s thinning, black hair lay slicked across his scalp and how his cream-colored tunic stuck to his broad chest and stomach.

  “You pulled me out?”

  “That I did.” The man smiled and held his hand out for Sal to take it. “Euan Holkenhill, at your service once already and at any future time you should require it.”

  Sal felt Shilly stiffen beside him, but before he could think twice about taking the man’s hand, he had done so and found himself tugged to a sitting position, spluttering again.

  “You’re obviously not from around here,” Holkenhill went on, before Sal could thank him. “Maybe you’re with one of the merchants, come in on a caravan perhaps. Is there--?”

  “I’ll take him where he has to go,” Shilly said, kneeling close to Sal, her hand still on his forehead. Sal tried to pull free, but she held him close.

  “Will you do that? Good girl.” The man nodded, satisfied, and clambered to his feet. He wiped both hands on his damp shorts and took stock of his surroundings. “There’s nothing else to see here,” he called to the small crowd. “Back to School and home, all of you!”

  Holkenhill turned to Sal and winked. “Mind you stay out of trouble, now.” To Kemp he added, with a deep scowl: “You too, boy.”

  He didn’t need to add anything else--there was warning enough in his tone to make it clear what he thought had happened. Sal opened his mouth to protest that Kemp was unfairly accused, at least of pushing him off the jetty, but the older boy had turned away and begun marching along the beach, his hat back on to protect his pale face and neck from the burning sun.

  Shilly tugged Sal to his feet, her gaze not on him but on Holkenhill’s receding, round shape. “That was close,” she said, taking her hand off his face.

  The man was much shorter than Sal had realized. “He really rescued me?”

  She glanced back at him. “Eh? Oh, yes. He sure did. Dived off the jetty like a seal, hard though it is to believe. Guess he could see you better from above than I could, in the waves. But that wasn’t what I meant.” Her gaze was sharp. “Come on, will you? We should get you changed. At the very least, this gives us a good reason to skip the rest of School today.”

  They trudged the short distance to the hostel in silence, Sal keeping his eyes firmly on the ground and trying to keep up. His body felt weak and bruised, as though it had been pummeled with hammers. He dreaded to think what his new School mates thought of him now. His mind was still reeling--and not just from his narrow escape. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something had been looking for him through the water. Something a long way away. Something--or someone--that knew his real name: Sayed.

  But that wasn’t possible, he told himself. Only one person besides himself knew his heart-name, and that was his father. His oxygen-starved brain must have dreamed the voice calling him. He heard it again, replaying it in his memory: Sayed! Is that you? Certainly, it was unfamiliar--not Shilly’s voice, or Von’s, or any of the other women he had met in the previous days. His mother’s voice? It might have been--although Sal’s father said that he had been much too young when she had left them to have any memories of her. Maybe he had made it all up in one last desperate pretence that he might know her before he died …

  When they arrived at the hostel, it was obvious Von was out; the lower floor was cool and dark, feeling unlived-in. Apart from some muffled noises upstairs--the other guest, Sal assumed, in the communal bathroom--the building was empty. Sal was glad for that, though. He wanted to catch his breath in peace and quiet.

  They went to the room Sal and his father shared. He dug out his spare set of clothes, changed into them while Shilly turned her back, and set the wet ones out to dry in the light coming through the window. The memory of salty water flooding down his throat and into his lungs was still strong. He tried to think about something else.

  “When you say scabs, you mean seagulls, right?”

  She nodded. “That’s one of their names. Around here, anyway.”

  “So why did you say I should watch out for them? They’re just birds.”

  “Hello? Weren’t you on the jetty an hour ago? They attacked us.”

  He remembered the blur of beak, claw and wing almost as vividly as he remembered the sea. It certainly seemed as though the birds had been united in their assault. “But why? And how did you know they would do it?”

  She looked down at her hands. “I didn’t. Not exactly. I just figured they might not like you. Or your kind--from inland.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re more than birds, sometimes, although even as birds they’re pretty dislikeable. They’re scavengers--the rats of the sea. But they’re sensitive to the Change and can be used as spies. The Sky Wardens like them, because the scabs extend their power onto land. They can fly a fair distance and they have no scruples. The scabs, I mean.”

  He went cold. “You mean the Sky Wardens made them attack us?”

  “No.” She looked uncertain, and he suspected she was as out of her depth as he was. “They might have been acting on instinct. Maybe they saw something they didn’t like and tried to get rid of it.”

  She raised her hand as though to point, but the sound of footsteps approaching the door made them freeze. After the experience on the jetty, they were both jumpy. Sal didn’t know what to expect next from Fundelry.

  The footsteps came steadily closer, but passed the door without breaking rhythm. Sal--who had hoped it might be his father--assumed that either Von or her other guest had walked innocently along the corridor.

  The thought of his father did give him some concern, though.

  “Don’t worry about him,” said Shilly when Sal brought it up. “He’ll hear soon enough, wherever he is. It’s a small town and word travels fast. Will he be angry at you, do you think? At us?”

  Sal lay back on his bed, glad for the warmth of the room. “No. He’ll just worry. He’s always told me to be careful of water.”

  Shilly eyed him crookedly. “You like your dad, don’t you?”

  “Yes, of course I do.”

  “Don’t act like it’s a stupid question. Lots of people don’t like their parents. I never even knew mine. But I guess you don’t have much choice, do you? There’s no one else to talk to, out on the road. If you didn’t get on, you’d go crazy.”

  A door opened and closed downstairs. The movements around him were making him nervous. “So what do we do now?” Sal asked. “We can’t sit around here all day.”

  She pulled a face. “I suppose not.
People will really begin to talk. Perhaps I should get you away from here for a while. Show you around the area instead.”

  “I saw most of it the day after I arrived.”

  “Not the most interesting stuff, I’ll bet.” She bounced off the bed with a grin. “Yeah, that’s it. Let’s go.”

  Sal hesitated briefly, but sitting around was only going to give him time to dwell on what had happened. And it wasn’t as if he had been hurt. Getting out would probably do him good.

  He stopped to write a brief note for his father, telling him that everything was okay. As he bent over the yellowing scrap of paper, Shilly pointed at his ear.

  “Right. And I’d take that off if I were you.”

  He put a hand to his ear-ring. “Why?”

  “It might attract attention. You’re getting enough of that as it is. If Holkenhill had noticed it, things might’ve turned out very differently.”

  Sal remembered the way she had clutched his head as he had recovered from his impromptu swim--not out of concern for his health, it seemed, but to hide the ear-ring. His ward, as Lodo had called it.

  “Just who is this Holkenhill?”

  “I’ll tell you on the way.” She opened the door. “Put the damned thing around your neck or in a pocket and let’s get moving.”

  He found a piece of string thin enough to go through one of the three small holes in the silver arc of the ear-ring, yet strong enough to trust, and tied it around his neck so that the ward hung on his chest. It felt strange there, rather than in his ear. He felt oddly vulnerable.

  Vulnerable or not, he followed Shilly out of the hostel and away from the square. At first Sal thought she was taking him towards the secret entrance to Lodo’s workshop, and he memorized every landmark they passed, but as they left the town she took them in a different direction--inland and northeast, not along the old road. Instead, she skirted several empty houses and their weed-choked yards on the edge of town. They scrambled through dense scrub until she reached the steep, crumbling walls of a dry riverbed, then led him along its sandy bottom. The air was still and hot, and within minutes he was sweating.

  “Holkenhill?” he prompted her. Their voices were the only sounds apart from the buzzing of insects.

  “Euan Holkenhill is our local Selector’s representative,” she said. “The Strand is huge, and each Selector has a large area to cover, so they appoint reps to look after districts of five to ten towns.” She stopped at the look on his face. “You already know this. Okay. Well, Holkenhill is our local rep. He comes from Showell, three towns along, and sweeps by once or twice a year to make sure everything’s in order, and to collect application forms, which he’s probably doing at the moment. That’s why you have to be careful. He’s not a Warden, but he’s not an idiot, either. He’ll realize in the end.”

  The Selector’s representative … A shiver went through him. Euan Holkenhill was just one step away from a Sky Warden! Habitual fear cast the encounter in a completely new light. How close had he been to giving everything away?

  Then annoyance stirred in him. What had he almost given away? Shilly obviously had some idea. Everyone seemed to know more about what was going on than him.

  “Realize what?”

  “You really don’t know?” She looked at him sharply, suspiciously. “As I said before, I’ve got a feeling there’s something going on. You and your father; your father and Lodo; Lodo and me; me and you. If I had a grain of talent in me, maybe I could tell. But I haven’t, so I can’t. All I can do is use my brain--and that’s served me in pretty good stead so far in my life.”

  She picked up a fallen stick and swished it through a patch of tall grass, scattering seeds.

  “Someone’s up to something, and I’m determined to find out what it is.”

  “Maybe you’re just being paranoid,” he suggested, half-heartedly playing devil’s advocate.

  She flicked a stone at him. “Smile when you say that.”

  “No, really. Why should Holkenhill care about my ward? It doesn’t mean anything. If it has any effect at all, it can’t be that big. It certainly didn’t work when I fell in the sea.”

  “It didn’t save you from the sea because metalworking is a Stone Mage art, and the sea belongs to the Sky Wardens. Don’t you know anything?”

  He felt himself blush. “Not about the Change. That’s your specialty, remember?”

  “It should be everyone’s. It’s all around us. How can you avoid it?”

  “Dad doesn’t like talking about it.”

  “Is that so?” Her irritation turned to interest again. “Seems odd that he’s looking for Lodo, then, doesn’t it?”

  Sal shrugged, finding the conversation uncomfortable. They walked for a while in silence, until he asked: “Where are we going?”

  “Not much further.”

  “That wasn’t what I asked.”

  “I know. But if you just wait you’ll find out for yourself.”

  He rolled his eyes and kept on walking.

  Shilly was true to her word. Barely had they walked another five minutes when he knew they had arrived. He noticed a slight change in the vegetation on the river banks; the trees became denser and the shadows between them darker. They rounded a sharp bend in the ancient river, and there it was.

  He thought, at first, that it was a wall: a wall ten feet high blocking the riverbed, like a dam. But he knew it couldn’t be a dam. Clearly, no water had run along the riverbed for years, and it had probably never been enough to warrant damming even when it had. Also, it stood taller than the banks, and stretched out of sight in either direction without curving, the left side markedly higher than the right. There were marks in places that looked like faded writing, at an angle of nearly ninety degrees to the horizontal, but he couldn’t read them even though he tried.

  Shilly stopped and held out her hands to frame the sight. “Here you go. Worth the wait?”

  “It’s a Ruin, isn’t it?”

  “It is indeed.” She led him closer to the right-hand bank. “People in town know about it, but they avoid it on the grounds that it’s supposed to be haunted. It’s not, but we don’t discourage them from believing it. Lodo and I come here when we don’t want to be interrupted.”

  “Has it been surveyed?”

  “Yes, a long time ago. I don’t know what they found, but there’s nothing interesting left. Except the place itself.”

  She climbed up the embankment, following the line of the wall. There she held out her hand to help him up. He could see where steps had been worn into the wall’s crumbling brickwork. They led over the top.

  “After you,” she said. “Be careful of your footing when you’re up, though, and don’t wander off. I’ll show you where to go.”

  Wondering what he would find, he clambered up the steps, eleven of them in total, and onto the top of the wall. There he straightened, and looked down.

  The wall marked the side of a building, a building that seemed to have tipped over onto its side and now lay half-buried in the earth around it. Instead of a roof, Sal saw another wall stretching a good thirty paces before him, and then at least as much to either side. Whereas the wall he had just climbed up seemed to be intact, this one had sagged and collapsed in a wide circle that gaped like a mouth full of rotten teeth, open to the sky. What had once been interior walls and floors chopped the dark circle into segments; some of these had fallen in, but many remained intact. A large tree grew from the far side of the hole, its thin trunk snaking upward to the light and sprouting a dozen frail-looking, feathery branches that waved in a breeze Sal couldn’t feel.

  Someone had laid planks across the gaps between the intact interior walls. They marked out a zigzag path from one side of the hole to the other.

  Shilly scrambled up beside him. “What do you think?”

  He didn’t know how to describe what he felt. “I
t’s amazing.”

  “You can feel it? Around us?”

  He nodded. “The air is--is buzzing.”

  “Like bees?”

  “No, not exactly.” His head was light, as though he’d been breathing too quickly. “When someone plays a didj, if you touch the wood you can feel the sound in your fingers. This is like that, but without the sound.”

  “Interesting.” She raised her eyebrows, then lowered them. “I see it in the light. It twinkles here--everything’s a bit sparkly around the edges. Lodo says he smells it. Maybe there’s no right way to describe what we’re picking up.” There was an excitement in her expression that he had seen before: when she had lit the fire in Lodo’s workshop. “It’s the Change, Sal--or a remnant of it, anyway. You’ve never felt it before?”

  Sal shook his head.

  “Well, you’re going to love it.”

  Sal inched further onto the “roof” of the structure. He wanted to explore the contents of the hole to see if the Sky Warden surveyors had missed something, but at the same time he was nervous. What if the surveyors had left something behind, and it turned out to be dangerous? There were stories about people who had met horrible deaths in ruined cities and buildings not dissimilar to this one. He had never believed any of them before--but here, feeling the weirdness in the air, he was no longer so certain.

  “Come on. Let’s go down.” Shilly stepped carefully across the rough, stone surface, heading for the nearest of the wooden planks. “Watch carefully, and only step where I step. If you fall, you’ll die. The bottom of this thing is a lot lower than the ground around it.”

  Sal swallowed his nervousness and followed. If she could do it, so could he, and this time there wasn’t any water to be afraid of--only height. He followed her to the edge of the hole, then out across it, waiting until she had crossed the first of the planks before stepping out after her. It wobbled slightly beneath his weight, but was wide and didn’t bend much. Both ends of the plank were firmly anchored onto stone, the far end fixed to a wall scarcely wider than his two feet end to end. It was quite solid, though. What had looked like a dangerously haphazard arrangement from a distance turned out to be a relatively safe fixture of the place, perhaps maintained by Lodo and Shilly, he thought.